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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Migration

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/maɪˈɡreɪʃən/nounCore term

In software engineering, migration means: A versioned script that changes a database schema in a controlled way, or, more broadly, a project to move data from one database or system to another.

In Turkish: migration, şema geçişi, veri taşıma

How it is used

In development, migrations are files managed by tools like Flyway, Liquibase, Alembic or Rails and Django migrations. You write, run, apply and roll back migrations. A 'database migration' project, such as Oracle to PostgreSQL, is a much bigger task.

Example sentences

  1. Write a migration that adds the column, and another one later that drops the old one.

  2. The deploy failed because a migration timed out on the large events table.

Common collocations

  • run a migration
  • write a migration
  • schema migration
  • roll back a migration
  • data migration
  • schemaThe structure of a database: its tables, columns, data types, keys and relationships. In some products it is also a named group of tables inside a database.
  • ALTER TABLEThe SQL statement that changes the structure of an existing table, for example to add, rename or drop a column or to add a constraint.
  • CREATE TABLEThe SQL statement that makes a new table, defining its name, its columns with their data types and its constraints such as the primary key.
  • DDLData definition language: the SQL statements that create, change and remove database objects, such as CREATE, ALTER and DROP.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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